Lessons in Capitalism #41: Storia Americana

“Archaeologists here have to destroy what they collect, because history belongs to whoever tells the story.” 

-Scout Tafoya

Perhaps the most famous Jack Kirby New Gods tale is The Pact. For many people, the story amounts to just the final page or so, wherein it’s revealed that Highfather and Darkseid swapped kids in order to end the war between them. A war that threatened to consume the entire universe and them along with it. But the story is about so much more than just that: It’s about the changing nature of history. Specifically, it’s a parable for what World War II was: the sea change from one understanding of how the world worked to another.

This is perhaps most telling in the role Darkseid plays within the majority of the story. Contrary to how many people play the evil God of Apokolips, Darkseid was not the actual main antagonist of the story. Or, at least, not in the traditional “I AM A BIG DEAL WHO IS GOING TO STOMP ON YOUR FACE.” He’s not even the master of Apokolips. Rather, he acts as a malevolent force acting behind the scenes, working to rise to a position of power greater than that he already held. He is a shadow manipulating players on both sides of a war, be it his uncle Steppenwolf or even Highfather himself, to rise to where we know him to be. In other words, Darkseid is Starscream and this is the story of how he beat Megatron.

 

Instead, that role belongs to Steppenwolf and Darkseid’s mother, Heggra. In many regards, Steppenwolf and Heggra represent the old way of being. The way that existed before your Darkseids, Orions, and Scott Frees. The monarchs who treated the land as another colony to conquer. They are the brutes who will murder for kicks, because they have a divine right to rule. “I hunt where and what I wish,” says Steppenwolf.

 

But their time is not long. For as with the world wars, we saw the end of seeing history through the lens of their dynasty. Sure, some of us still fantasize about how great it would be for a new king to rise, while others fetishize the monarchy. But ultimately, such stories are mere pageantry, mere aesthetics rather than reality. By its very definition, the divine right of kings cannot be bestowed by the people. It must be given to those who deserve it. But the question lies in who bestows such a power? This is, in many ways, the question at the heart of this final season of Fargo: If something is defined by what is not, what is absent, who then defines what it is?

 

Fargo has a rather straightforward answer to this question: the willingness to kill those who are deemed unclean in the eyes of the American God. In East/West, there’s an offhanded nod to the HUAC trials occurring around the same time as the season of Fargo was set. The targets of HUAC where what you’d expect from an extremely conservative organization: Queers, People of Color, Non-Conformists. Whoever its gaze looked upon was deemed Unamerican lest they were willing to give up their fellows and swear loyalty to the United States of America. One nation under God.

 

You’re American as long as America deems you American.

“Be afraid of stories, be afraid of storytellers. They are only trying to lie to you.”

-Kieron Gillen

The sea change at the heart of The Pact is much like the cruel joke at the end of 1066 and All That: this is the end of History. There have been many scholars to argue such a point within the world. Francis Fukuyama being the most famous of which. At the heart of his claim was the notion that History is best understood through the lens of the rise of Capitalism, a fitting claim to understand the implications of given the show we’re talking about. That, no matter what happens in the future (be it the rise of Hitler 2: Electric Boogaloo, Climate Change, or what have you), the world will remain as it has always been: Neoliberal capitalism all the way down. That you can somehow win the war of ideas as if that’s how the story works.

Many utopian figures have argued that the way to beat an idea is with a better idea. The most recent of which is in Rian Hughes’ XX, where the phrase is stated verbatim. In a story where we must choose between capitalism and monarchism/fascism, capitalism is certainly the better idea. A little bit of freedom is always better than no freedom at all. But what that sentiment misses, crucially, is that a) just because capitalism is the better idea, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea and b) just because capitalism was the idea that ultimately won, doesn’t mean it was the only option.

Often when looking at history, the storyteller will focus on specific elements, structure it in such a way as to make the present seem inevitable. Be they the textbooks that argue that Capitalism was always going to beat communism or John Lewis and Nate Powel’s March, which concludes its tale of Civil Rights with Obama being President. The temptation of the neoliberal view of history as the rise and fall of stock markets, where it was guaranteed to be the winner no matter what, often ends poorly.

 

For us, we need look no further than the rise of Fascism. Contrary to the implications of Fukuyama, fascism is not antithetical to capitalism. In many regards, fascism has risen to power in societies that declare themselves to be democratic. Berlin before the Nazis was considered the cultural capital of the world, where Socialists, Queers, and Non-Conformists lived side by side. The thugs of Hitler were given power, they didn’t take it from anyone.

 

In many regards, Darkseid being the child of monarchs is apt for his story. Throughout the New Gods under Kirby, Darkseid is presented as a fascist working within systems to corrupt them from within. This has always been the MO of fascists. Not to simply conquer the world, but to use the systems against us. Fascism was born in this period of time, when the family business of monarchism was deemed to be too chaotic: the iron will of a fascist. When capitalism, and specifically American Capitalism, began to take root.

 

Of course, it’s just a story. One look at the brain trust that fascism always gravitates towards, and you see a bunch of incompetents who think themselves smarter than they actually are. That isn’t to say that intelligence precludes fascism. Rather, they tend to see nothing wrong with a system that hinges upon always winning, even as it repeatedly fails utterly time and time again, only being kept together by men with guns slaughtering the opposition. When it does fail beyond the scope of strong men, they blame individuals within the system rather than fascism itself. Some will even argue the problem was that they put a jock in charge where a nerd would have done so much better.

But then, there are other ghosts haunting in the halls of History, waiting for the right moment to strike the future. In Fargo’s climactic moment, it shows its understanding of this through the return of Zelmare Roulette. As we have discussed previously in Lessons in Capitalism #35, Zelmare and her lover, the late Swanee Capps, are anarchists. Rejecting the system as it is in favor of a better life where they are free to live and love as they please. Like many alternatives to capitalism, agents within the system actively worked to destroy it before it could be anything more than a pipe dream. The lovers are dead, and the world shines on.

 

Except, they didn’t quite get them all. Zelmare survived the war, the betrayal, the pale white gaze of the Black Racer, and she got one of the bastards. She’ll go back into the margins, the places where History rarely looks. As an individual, Zelmare can’t take down the system. The story she gets isn’t promised a happy ending. One where we are freed from the chains of capitalism, even as it strangles them as well. They like the chains because everyone else is strangled faster. That’s why Josto Fadda’s pathetic pleas for something better are met with deaf ears: he didn’t care until the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party wanted to eat his face.

“I used to draw comics, before all of this, the ring. Before everything. Y’know comics, right? Panels, pictures, adventure. I don’t—you probably don’t know, but to separate the panels you draw these lines, gutters they’re called. You can kind of make a grid out of them. It’s weird. I’d stare at them , the grids, they looked like something… familiar. Took me a while to see it, I mean. All those hanging crosses. It’s a cage, right? They’re just bars on a cage. The story, the adventure, is locked behind them—separated from us. As if it’s something savage. As if we’re something civilized.”

-Tom King

Fargo closes out its fourth, and potentially final, season with a question: just who is writing the history, this true story, we are being told. 

Is it the Jewish World War II veteran, returning home to find a world broken by cruelty and hatred? Where fascism is always on the prowl waiting for just the right moment to turn humanity into math, into an equation that can it can use to control the populace, exterminate those that it hates. Whose utopian dreams ultimately failed, as the children he sought to enlighten towards a better way of being instead voted for Thatcher and Regan.

 

Is it the child of another veteran of the War? One whose experiences were not against the Nazis, but the fascism of his own men trying to rape India into submission. Who raised his child with the horrors of the nuclear bomb and failed to get rid of the bases housing such bombs in his back yard. A child who tried to change things from within, but found out far too late that the system is not kind, it doesn’t care for individuals living within it. It only cares about the bottom line. A revelation that came far too late for them to stop them from hurting people.

 

Is it the Jewish ex-CIA agent who left the agency with a profound sense of guilt for, at the very least, what he was complicit in? Who coped by writing stories about sad, broken men unable to change a machine built only to kill. That doesn’t care what tin pot dictator is in charge of the black sheep of the world as long as they keep things orderly and without interaction with the rest of the world. Stories of an undestroyable system that most would rather exist because it gives them power than create one that could cost them everything. Who skirts on the edge of a leftist breakthrough, but always ends up holding on to a liberal vantage point.

 

Is it Martin fucking Freeman?

 

Fargo season 4 doesn’t have the answer. Sure, it frames itself as a history told by a young black girl, but her story, as with all other stories, leaves out details. Details she could never know or guess. History is ultimately a story that is based on what we know. And what we know is changing as time moves on and on. Information is found and lost and found again. Perhaps, as our narrator muses, History is like memory. Things that are forgotten can be remembered. The alternatives tend to have a way of haunting the future.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”

-Ursula K Le Guin